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Managed Services Overview

Managed services in today’s world are vastly more complex than ever previously imagined. Many platforms hosting applications for large, small enterprise corporations and public/private sector services now exist and are rapidly expanding at exponential rates. 

Complexity around cloud and hosting services with virtualization, and more recently the introduction of SDN (Software Defined Networking), makes it even more difficult to manage and understand exactly how these environments are performing and operating.

The legacy way of managing these environments was to stack up individual framework management systems that performed specific functions, for example, performance management, node management etc. 

This approach is not only costly from a multiple element software license requirement, but also requires separate hardware for each element framework management function thus increasing annual platform and license annuity maintenance support costs. 

The multi-element framework management approach can also suffer from a number of operational issues, for example; unsynchronized delta times around service events and alarms thus making troubleshooting almost impossible to pinpoint root cause, or more importantly never actually knowing what occurred due to the lack of control and functionality around the environments being managed. 

Managed Services Providers that take this approach invariably, never provision a fully integrated framework of functional technology because it is costly to procure, provision and operate. 

What they do not foresee though is that their profit margins will erode due to the lack of control around the services they are managing, as they will continually breach contractual SLAs that will incur service credits that will erode profit margins and more importantly loose customer credibility and customer retention.

For Managed Service Providers today it is not just about cost, it is about proving and demonstrating that you have a grip that encompasses customer’s networks and hosting environments, prove and demonstrate how your management systems visualize service operation, control, govern, reduce threats through vulnerability and compliance management, and maintain consistent high-levels of service availability. These functions are key ingredients for maintaining sustained levels of service assurance.